Читать книгу Clara Barton, Professional Angel - Elizabeth Brown Pryor - Страница 13

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Clara's visit to the Learneds lasted only a few months. In the hazy days of late summer 1851 she returned to her family at North Oxford, still without plans and in a depressed state of mind. Despite her fine scholarship in Clinton, she had been forced to leave before completing the entire course, and for the remainder of her life she considered her education lacking. Though others would view her as learned and erudite, Barton felt that her formal instruction had been rather haphazardly won. She would fill every little gap between jobs or while ill with study. When well into her eighties she embarked on the study of Thucydides and Xenophon because she felt “ignorant” without the benefit of their insight.

Barton's arrival at her home was unceremonious, and she experienced a distressing feeling of never having left. The hills and wooded streams surrounding North Oxford looked pleasantly familiar, but nothing compelled her to stay in the town. She had left because she saw that her talents were under-used and her time wasted there. If she stayed now, her bold escape to Clinton would be meaningless, and she could look forward to little beyond simple teaching and family association.¹

Back once more in the scenes of her childhood and the ten years of teaching, which she later wrote “always haunted me as lost,” Barton felt again the old agonies of uselessness and dependence.² Her brothers were busily rebuilding their mills; the school she founded for the laborers was thriving without her assistance; sister Sally was thoroughly preoccupied with raising her two sons. Her mother's recent death had broken up the household, and Clara wrote sadly that she felt she was returning to a “home that was still a home, and yet not all a home.”³ Barton wished her father would remarry and keep the old farm going.⁴ Realizing, however, that he was over seventy, “still hale” but comfortably established at brother David's house, she knew there was little she could do to further influence or help him.⁵ Gradually she reached the uncomfortable conclusion that everything was thriving without her and that to remain in North Oxford would be to eat again the bread of dependence. “I know too well how bitter it is,” Barton lamented.⁶ Forty years later she could still recall the discomfort of that time and summed up her reasons for leaving in a single forceful phrase: “I was not needed.”⁷

Throughout August and the lingering brightness of Indian summer she pondered her future. Distracted and more self-contained than ever, she spent the time riding horseback. One fellow townsman later recalled how “stately and noble” she appeared to him at this time. Preoccupation with her immediate plans probably kept Barton from noticing that it shocked several people when she chose not to dress in mourning for her mother. (It startled them further to hear her declare that she did not grieve and that it would thus be insincere for her to wear the traditional black.⁸) She made some effort to socialize by enjoying the opportunity to renew acquaintances with Elvira Stone, Annie and Frances Childs, and her nephew Bernard Vassall. But behind her ready humor and easy conversation was a nagging doubt about the future. “I could feel no other way at home,” Barton wrote a few months later, admitting that she was preoccupied with plans to get away. She knew that she must leave; deciding how to go was the only rub. “I had no where to go no one to go [to] nothing to go with and no way of earning my living if I did go anywhere, at least I had no employment or situation in view.”⁹

In this frame of mind Barton was eager to seize an opportunity that presented itself in the early fall. Charles and Mary Norton had remained favorites among her acquaintances at the Clinton Liberal Institute. Anxious to retain the friendship, they wrote to Clara, asking her to visit them in Hightstown, New Jersey. Mary was a mature and deeply religious girl of sixteen; in Clinton she had looked to her friend Clara for guidance and viewed her with a young girl's idolizing eyes. Both Clara and Mary had enjoyed the relationship and had used the mentor and protege roles to help bridge their fourteen-year age gap. And of course there was Charlie, now a handsome and ebullient twenty-one-year-old, with whom she felt a strong intellectual tie. When her friends’ parents wrote to underscore the invitation, Barton accepted readily. In mid-October she set off, with no knowledge of the future but grateful to escape the stifling atmosphere of home.¹⁰

Traveling by train and steamer, Barton arrived in Hightstown, where she was met by “the familiar contours of my old friend Charlie Norton.”¹¹ He drove her through the village—a simple community consisting of a railroad depot, general store, and post office, and Universalist and Baptist churches—to the Nortons’ farm three miles away. It was a prosperous place, containing 178 acres of level, fertile land on which the Nortons grew wheat, corn, and fruits, and raised sheep, cattle, and dairy cows. The mixed farming, aiming as it did at self-sufficiency, must have pleased Clara, reminding her of the similar farms on which she had grown up.¹² The house too was inviting. She would remember it as “a commodious country house,” with a sitting room geared to family activities. Books and papers covered a center table, a piano stood in the corner, and a settee and potted plants gave a cozy and comfortable air to the room.¹³

She soon found that the Nortons were “the XYZ in Hightstown,” dominating local activities and commanding unparalleled respect.¹⁴ Richard Norton, the family patriarch, had been raised a Quaker but converted to Universalism as a young man, much as Barton's own father had. Once convinced of the truth of Universalist doctrines, Richard Norton enthusiastically espoused them to his neighbors and relatives. His own position in the community had been consolidated by locally prestigious family connections. His wife, who was affectionately known as “Mistress Nelly,” let her husband dominate her as he did the rest of the family. Charged with running the household, she appeared to Clara to be “slight, active, orderly, busy” and to possess “nervous hands and, clear blue eyes full of capacity and care.” The family further consisted of the Nortons’ six children, four of whom still lived at home. Besides Mary—the youngest and the only girl—and Charlie, there were James and Joshua, who were in their late twenties when Barton arrived. A housekeeper, Margaret Haskins, completed the household.¹⁵

The Nortons embraced Clara wholeheartedly, and her early days in New Jersey were filled with pleasure in the company of this merry group. “A sterling family it is,” she told her nephew, “good as gold and true as the sun, every one of them.”¹⁶ They included her in church activities and weddings, barn raisings and nut-gathering expeditions. She especially enjoyed Charlie's company. Together they explored neighboring towns or sat in the Nortons’ drawing room writing letters on a shared lap desk.¹⁷ The evenings of teasing and piano music, of the boys’ antics as they “telegraphed” secret messages to her through the wall, gave her a strong sense of fellowship, which the Nortons shared.¹⁸ “I have learned a Quaker welcome and a warm hearty one it is too,” she reported.¹⁹ When, after two weeks, she talked of returning to Hubbell s, the family refused to listen.

The Nortons sensed, however, that Barton could not long remain comfortable without an occupation. Soon after her arrival, Richard Norton asked her if she thought she would be able to teach school. She had chosen not to reveal her past history in Clinton and had kept the policy—”it is my way you know”—in Hightstown.²⁰ Thus it was with skepticism that Norton approached her, and with hesitancy that she replied. The position that was offered was at the nearby Cedarville School, renowned for its rough gang of boys, who were especially fearsome during the winter term. The troubles outlined to her at the school must have seemed an old familiar story by now, but she told the Nortons only that she would try, if they would send Mary along to help her.²¹

“Commenced school,” Clara noted in her diary on October 23, 1851. Her practiced eye must have noticed, with mingled pleasure and frustration, the similarities between this country school and those over which she had presided for the past ten years. The building itself was woefully like the ramshackle structures she had fought to improve in North Oxford, and the expressions that showed on the faces of her pupils were also familiar. She read expectation and timidity on the countenances of the younger children, but among the older boys the looks were challenging and defiant.²²

Clara Barton was in her element in these simple surroundings. She let Mary introduce the children to her one by one, and when she came to one large boy, Hart Bodine, she startled him by stating that she knew him to have “the reputation of a great rogue in school” but expected him to behave now. She further abashed the boy by asking him to help her remove the switches that had been used by the previous teacher. “When she had him carry them all outdoors and break them into small bits,” the boy's mother recalled, “and tenderly took him by the hand, assuring him she would never need them, for he was one of her big boys and she could depend on him to help keep order in the school, he was simply overwhelmed.” Barton saw that the students had come to expect chastisement and received it almost as recreation. When she told them there would be no punishment, the game was over.²³

She also won over her pupils by her “entire want of all formality” and her habit of “taking the pupils into her confidence.”²⁴ One student noted that she rarely sat at her desk, preferring to walk among the children or to stand at the stove “with one foot crossed in somewhat masculine fashion and resting on the hearth.”²⁵ At recess she played ball with the boys or talked with them of philosophy. “Button” was the favorite game on nasty days, and she sometimes joined in the fun. “Then they are so overwhelmed they can find no means of expressing this gratitude but by giving me the button every time they go ‘round,” she told Bernard.²⁶ By setting herself with the pupils instead of against them, and by establishing clear standards at the outset, she kept discipline by simply expecting them to conform to her behavioral norms. By the end of November, her reputation was so well established that she had eight or ten pupils from other districts in the school and at one time crowded sixty pupils under the leaky roof.²⁷ “To all who remember Clara Barton as a teacher at Cedarville,” wrote one Hightstown resident, “her success is still a tale of wonder.”²⁸

At the time Barton wrote that it was “the most pleasant school thus far that I ever had.”²⁹ Nevertheless, there were elements of the job that disturbed her. The children had been poorly trained academically; they had been exposed only to spelling and simple arithmetic, a shocking state of affairs for pupils in their teens. The students were anxious to learn, however, and Barton instituted classes in geography, American history, and natural philosophy. More bothersome to Barton was her discovery that the school was not free. Each student paid two dollars per term for basic studies and an additional dollar for higher branches of learning. The proceeds went to the teacher and constituted her pay. Imbued with the long and sacred traditions of free public education in Hubbell s, Barton found it a difficult situation to accept. She acknowledged that teaching here was more profitable than in New England, but it dismayed her to bill the students at term's end, and she relieved herself of this burden by soliciting the aid of Mary and Charles during the accounting process. “I had kept time for grown men,” Clara remarked, “but never for little children.”³⁰ Although she quietly sought aid from the state, she received only $19.10 for the term, barely enough to keep the schoolhouse repaired.³¹ After considering starting a campaign to rid the area of subscription schools, Clara decided against it. “I was in a different social atmosphere, and realizing in a way the value of discretion, I kept my reflections to myself.”³²

Barton's school was going well, but troubles appeared in other areas of her life. Chief among these was the lack of privacy she felt in the Norton household. What had begun as a pleasant feeling of inclusion in the family's activities had become a social burden. By January 1852 she had grown tired of the entertainments, which consisted “chiefly in the attempt to have as many kinds of cake as possible on one's table.”³³ Used to interspersing companionship with solitude, Clara found tedious the expectation that even letter writing would take place in the family drawing room amidst the distractions of piano playing and conversation. Worse yet, her presence was required on every family outing. The situation became absurd one Sunday morning when Barton decided not to accompany the Nortons to church. “I…thought that need make no difference with the rest of them,” she wrote in exasperation to Bernard Vassall, “but not an inch would one of them go…. I offered to go when I see [sic] the effect I was producing but they would not allow it on any consideration.”³⁴ To avoid the confusion, she resorted to writing her diary and correspondence in the schoolroom while her pupils studied, and privately sought a way to remedy the problem. Spring found Barton still complaining to her diary of her inability to determine her own activities, however. She had just begun writing a letter to her brother when “a wild set of company came from church and everything must be laid aside—pass a foolish and unsatisfactory day with which I am morally sure no one could have been much pleased.”³⁵

At this time, too, a set of romantic entanglements left her confused and alternately exhilarated or depressed. It was a period when Clara indulged in flirtation and several young men seriously courted her. Charlie Norton was still among the suitors, and she was as attracted to his fine intellect, genial nature, and good looks as ever. Together they visited Trenton and Philadelphia, went sleigh riding, and roamed the woods. When he returned to Clinton she missed him and anxiously awaited his arrival home. But Charlie was her junior by nearly a decade. Whether he knew of the age difference or not—for, as she wrote, the good citizens of Hightstown had no idea of her past, and she might “have been taken for any age from 15 to 25”—there was a difference in experience that gave a certain adulation to his view of her. Barton found this flattering, but, as with Oliver Williams and others she would relate to in this way, it fostered on her part a sense of superiority that precluded a response to Charlie's affectionate gestures. The situation was further complicated by the flirtation of Charlie's brothers, James and Joshua. They liked to tease her by “bearding” her, their term for drawing their rough beards across her face in mock kisses. Her protests were gen erally ignored; indeed, as James reported, they “only set Joshua on all the more.”³⁶

Another Hightstown swain, Edgar Ely, put in his appearance soon after Clara's arrival in the town. A lawyer and self-taught scholar, Ely impressed her as “one of the most unpretending men I ever met.”³⁷ He patiently accompanied her as she walked to and from school in her tall rubber boots, took her sleigh riding, and invited her to use his extensive library.³⁸ The Nortons liked to rib Barton about his habit of meeting her in the road and abruptly turning around to walk the other way with her.³⁹ Clara showed some initial enthusiasm for this admirer, but after a short time his attentions barely rated a mention in her diary.

Clara was, in fact, preoccupied with an interest of her own. Noted generally in her diary as “JLE,” he was Joshua Ely, a farmer who lived near Philadelphia. How and when Barton met this young man is unclear, but by the time of her removal to Hightstown they were regular correspondents. The frequency of their letters increased during Barton's stay there, as did the anticipation with which she awaited the mail. She became “rather melancholy” when she received no letters; then her feelings soared when the familiar envelopes arrived. “Alone, quite happy,” she wrote in her diary on March 19, 1852; “J's letter was longer than usual and of course pleased me in proportion to its length.”⁴⁰ This was, however, to be the last such jubilant notation. By March 31 Clara was expressing surprise that she had not heard “from JLE think must be sick or worse but fear to imagine.”⁴¹ When a few days later she still had received no letter, she was so agitated that she could not concentrate on work or conversation. Acutely sensitive to the fact that at thirty she had had no serious love affair, she concluded that “there is no such thing as true friendship, at least not for me.” She evidently determined to find the root of Ely's silence, for a fortnight later, having still received no letter, she visited her friend. The details of their meeting are omitted from Barton's diary, but that it dashed her romantic hopes is evident from her entry of April 20: “Have kept no journal for a month or more had nothing to note as I had done nothing but some things have transpired in the time which are registered where they will never be effaced in my lifetime.”⁴² No further communication with Joshua Ely is recorded after this date.

During this period of turmoil—exacerbated by news of yet another burning at the Barton Mills in North Oxford and squabbles with the parents of a few of her pupils—Barton's mood was characterized by a heightened depression. Amidst the laughing (and ever-present) Nortons she felt alone and under pressure to maintain a cheery countenance. “I have seldom felt more friendless,” she lamented. “True I laugh and joke but could weep that very moment and be the happier for it.”⁴³ The depth of her despair caused her to lose confidence in herself and the world. Even as she struggled to stop her “useless complaints,” she seriously considered suicide.⁴⁴ “There is not a living thing but would be just as well off without me,” she wrote on March 11; “I contribute to the happiness of not a single object and often to the unhappiness of many and always my own, for I am never happy.”⁴⁵ The whole world seemed false and brought her to her “old inquiry again, what is the use of living in it.” “I have grown weary of life,” she concluded, “at an age when other people are enjoying it most.”⁴⁶

It is tempting to view these musings as Barton's earliest struggle with what was to become a lifelong battle against chronic depression. Her words suggest, however, that this low period in the spring of 1852 was simply part of a continuum; Barton's diary entries are the first daily recording of her depression, not evidence of the first instance of it. It was an “old inquiry,” this questioning of life's purpose. She alluded to a long history of such despair when she confidentially told her nephew that she had “lived over years wishing myself dead.…I could feel no other way at home.”⁴⁷ Moreover, the problems that faced Barton in Hightstown were much the same as those she encountered in the years before she broke “away from the long shackles” and went to Clinton—they were simply heightened by her unfortunate love affair. She had left her home town, with its unhappy associations of dependence and unrewarding work, only to find herself again a member of a domineering family and submerged in the minutiae of a job that held no challenge. Bound by a society that required far less of an educated spinster than she had to give, Barton was haunted by the horrible spectre of an unchanging and unfulfilled life. Thus, as she again contemplated her future in the thin warmth of the March days, Barton saw little reason to be optimistic. “I know how it will be at length,” she surmised. “I shall take a strange sudden start and be off somewhere and all will wonder at and judge and condemn, but like the past I shall survive it all and go on working at some trifling unsatisfactory thing, and half paid at that.”⁴⁸

The final term at Barton's school ended on April 20. It had been a most pleasant group of children: “I have never been able to find a blemish in them,” she told her nephew.⁴⁹ With Charlie's help she completed the repugnant task of billing the students, swept the room, and closed the door for the last time. Barton's feelings at term's end were mixed, for she recognized that the school had filled a distinct need in her. “Would scarce know how to pass my time without it,” she admitted. “Should be very lonely I am sure.”⁵⁰ Yet she was glad that this obligation was fulfilled and that she was now free to leave Hightstown. A few pleasant excursions with the Nortons, a few days of dressmaking, and she suddenly announced, just as she had foretold, her intention of leaving. She had formulated her plans by herself and preferred to reveal as little as possible to the Nortons. As they accompanied her to the Hightstown depot on May 25, her hosts talked excitedly of activities they would share when she came back. “They thought it a visit, and that I would soon return,” Barton remembered. “I knew that I never would.”⁵¹

The train on which she embarked carried her only a short ten miles to the town of Bordentown, New Jersey. Barton herself seems not to have known what drew her to this community. Fifty years later she believed it might have been “historical associations.” The town was, in fact, well endowed in this regard, having served as a home for Francis Hopkinson, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, and political theorist Thomas Paine. The town's most famous resident, however, was Joseph Bonaparte, the exiled king of Spain and brother of Napoleon I. The stately villa that had served as his residence had burned to the ground years before Clara Barton arrived, but the stories of his life in Bordentown gave the place a prestige and intrigue that she found seductive. The town had first taken her fancy on a trip she made there in January 1852. She had thought the lack of paint on some buildings gave it a shabby aspect, but its spectacular situation on the Delaware River had filled her with wonder. As headquarters for the Camden-Amboy railroad and the Delaware and Raritan Canal, Bordentown was something of a crossroads of transportation in the 1850s, a thriving community of granite buildings and tobacco factories. Bordentown also had a drawing card in the form of Charlie Norton, who had arrived in late April to teach school. On yet another journey with an uncertain future, it comforted Clara to see a familiar face.⁵²

She did not have an exact goal in mind, and her initial efforts at finding a job in Bordentown proved fruitless. After a few days, Barton traveled the short distance to Trenton, where she spoke with the local school trustee about establishing a public school. Their conversation was lengthy and cordial but inconclusive. She jotted a brief and discouraging memo in her diary—”am just where I was this morning as far as employment is concerned”—but she was forming a challenging idea. The lack of free public schools in New Jersey had disturbed Barton, and she had wondered at the antiquated public opinion that forestalled efforts to alleviate the situation. Why not start a free school, which would serve as a model for other communities in the state? With a renewed sense of purpose she contacted several prominent men in Trenton, who addressed her questions sympathetically but showed no signs of acting on her ideas. One gentleman, a Mr. Cunningham, found Miss Barton herself more appealing than her philanthropic notions, and he spent several days escorting her around the city, holding her attention with promises of influence with the state school board. One afternoon while he was driving her to the local orphan asylum, she caught wind of his less honorable intentions. The next day, angered and depressed over having lost valuable time and opportunities, she journeyed back to Bordentown.⁵³

It was easy for Barton to picture a system of public schools, which would mirror those she had known in Hubbell s. But in New Jersey there were few models that would activate the imaginations of school boards or public officials. Laws providing for the creation of free schools had been passed in the state as early as 1817, though there was no comprehensive legislation until 1846. Public opinion, however, which was concerned with inequities in the distribution of public school funds and the social stigma attached to those attending “pauper” schools, did not keep pace with the legislation. A free school had been established in Nottingham in 1844, and by 1850 there were public classrooms in Trenton and several smaller towns, but these were isolated and often temporary, and the movement failed to catch the public fancy. Not until 1866 did a statewide effort at providing public education find real support in New Jersey.⁵⁴

It was thus necessary for Barton to marshal every conceivable argument to persuade officials in Bordentown to accept the idea of public education. She talked first to Peter Suydam, the editor of the Bordentown Register and a member of the school board. A genial man and something of a jack-of-all-trades, Suydam was to become one of Clara's favorite companions. At this meeting, however, he seemed to her only a tense and official obstacle to overcome. She told him she had observed that the local subscription schools were taught by persons who were well-meaning and often “elegant,” but whose educational qualifications were strictly limited. When the children's knowledge grew beyond that of the matrons, they became an embarrassment and were barred from the classroom. Worse yet, Barton believed that the brightest children were the first to be “graduated into the street,” for they most blatantly challenged the teacher and pointed up her weaknesses. As a final, if not tactful, argument, she maintained that New England had proved the worth of universal education with its superior productivity and ingenuity. It was time the citizens of Bordentown recognized the “force of ignorance, blind prejudice, and the tyranny of an obsolete public opinion,” and joined the ranks of the more civilized states.⁵⁵

Suydam listened with interest to the articulate young woman, but he came back with arguments of his own. There had actually been a free school a few years earlier, he explained, but an unsuitable teacher and inadequate class space had caused the experiment to fail. Housing for a school was indeed a problem in the town, as one official school report explained: “Bordentown district…does not possess a single school building which it can claim as its own.” Consequently, should the town wish to revoke a teacher's license or establish a school, it was hampered by being solely dependent on using the private teachers’ quarters for holding classes. These private teachers, Suydam explained, were greatly opposed to free schools, and their dissatisfaction would carry considerable influence among the townspeople. He believed Barton would be ostracized socially, if not subjected to outright ridicule. Finally, Suydam told her, the children themselves would not come because of their fear of the disgrace of being a public charge. Used to roaming the streets aimlessly, the boys would threaten and bully her and keep smaller children from coming to learn.⁵⁶

Suydam's arguments failed to discourage Barton. She cared little for the approbation of the town and thought the previous failures had been due to the teacher's personality, not the inappropriateness of the free school idea. As for the boys—well, she had already talked with them. Walking through Bordentown's narrow streets, she had encountered “little knots of them” on every corner. When she asked them why they were not in school they dispensed with the expected bravado and replied plaintively, “Lady, there is no school for us.” Barton found nothing derelict in the boys’ behavior; she believed they were mischievous simply because they were idle and bored. “I had studied the character of these boys,” she told Suydam, “and had interest and pity for, but no fear of them.”⁵⁷

Her poise and determined manner clearly impressed Peter Suydam, and Barton now underscored her persuasiveness with a trump card. She was, she told him, not an inexperienced and naive young woman but a veteran teacher of nearly fifteen years who had handled rougher boys than these, in rougher towns. Neither an adventuress nor a crusading idealist, she simply saw a chronic situation that needed remedying, and the idea of fulfilling that need challenged her.

Suydam was inspired by her words. He agreed to call a meeting of the school board to discuss the issue and invited Barton to attend. At the meeting she reiterated her arguments and effectively convinced the board that they should value her estimation of the situation, for as an experienced educator she had insight into the nature of the children. By the end of the evening she had won the confidence of the officials, who agreed to endorse a free school in the town. Moreover, she had won the school on her own terms, terms which would do much to establish the credibility of the experiment. Barton informed the board that she was willing to teach without salary, that they need provide only classroom space, but that the school must be supported and publicized by the school board. Without their approval she knew it would be considered merely another private school. “In fact,” she wrote adamantly, “it must stand by their order, leaving the work and results to me.”⁵⁸

With some difficulty the board found an old brick schoolhouse—reportedly first erected in 1798—on Crosswicks Street, several blocks from the center of town. Its dilapidated condition delayed the school's opening, and Barton waited impatiently for the repairs to be completed. “You see I am making a stir among them don’t you?” she boasted to the ever-faithful Bernard; “Well it will never hurt them, it is time they stired [sic] themselves to fit up school houses in Jersey—of all old sheds you never saw the like.”⁵⁹ Not content with merely airing the house (whose smell she claimed rivaled that of Cologne, Germany, said to be the worst-smelling city in Europe) and building new seats and benches, she instructed Peter Suydam to provide her with maps and blackboards. Blackboards were apparently something of an innovation in the town, but when Barton insisted that she would install them if he did not, Suydam laughingly acquiesced. “Yes, yes,” he replied, “you shall have them although no such mention is made in the contract.”⁶⁰

The contract, in fact, stated little beyond licensing “Clara H. Barton to teach or keep school in said district for the space of one year.” Under the auspices of the school board, the opening of the school was announced in the local paper and on signs posted throughout the community. Finally in early July, after more delays and with much anticipation, Barton set out for her first day of class.⁶¹

She was greeted by a schoolhouse and yard devoid of children, save a few curious boys perched on the rail fence that surrounded the grounds. Bidding them a cheerful good morning, she strolled around the yard, pointing out birds’ nests and butterflies and speaking all the while of pleasantries, not of books or studies. The six boys followed her into the schoolhouse, where she still refrained from playing the rigid schoolmarm. Instead she asked them about themselves and slowly eased into the role of teacher. Using the most striking objects in the room—the large, colorful maps of the United States, world, and Europe—as focal points, she began to answer their questions about the great oceans and foreign lands. She wooed them into the fascination of learning, with the mysteries of continents and customs, with every dramatic tale she could remember. With a certain smugness she noted that they “seemed to find my stories and my conversation generally quite entertaining.” She feared they would not return after the noon recess. To her relief, however, their numbers grew. The afternoon wore on in the same vein, as she used friendship and adventure to convert her audience. “In that three hours until four o’clock we had travelled the world over,” she recalled. Clara left at the end of the day, still without speaking of books or slates, commenting only that she would be back the next day.⁶²

Twenty boys stood outside the schoolhouse the next morning; by week's end she had nearly forty young faces to greet her. Barton had been confident of the school's success, but this ready response far surpassed her expectations or even her hopes. She believed the school would hold only fifty students, but in another week, teacher and pupils alike shoved and rearranged to squeeze in fifty-five. Barton gave up her own chair to an eager youngster, and when the news of this reached the school board, Peter Suydam sent a chair to her from his own parlor. She still attempted only a minimum of traditional instruction. “We were studying each other, more than books, and the chapters opened pleasantly.” Like her pupils in Hightstown, she found Bordentown students lacking in sound educational background but exceptionally well behaved.⁶³

The students, bored with their previous enforced idleness and anxious to make up for lost time, were such eager learners that they surprised even their teacher. “I have two hours intermission…it yet lacks twenty minutes of that time and here they have all set studying as if their lives depended on it,” Barton wrote to Mary Norton soon after the school opened, “for the last 3/4 of an hour, I have invited them to play instead but they don’t want to, I think they are so queer, don’t you?”⁶⁴ She set them to work learning to do sums, teaching arithmetic as a game—much as her brother Stephen had taught it to her—until they begged her to let them do more. While the fundamental branches of knowledge were honored, she let the advanced students experiment with the studies that interested them most. When she herself read the newly published Uncle Tom's Cabin and found it to be “excellent,” she gave it to the older boys. “My school boys…are reading and crying over it and wishing all sorts of good luck to Uncle Tom and the contrary to his oppressors,” she told a friend.⁶⁵ As her reputation for academic excellence and discipline grew she found some girls anxious to join the classes. Although she had vowed to take no more pupils into the over-crowded room and each morning found boys crying to get in, she could not turn these girls away. “The large boys met the emergency by smuggling in a little boy beside each,” she noted proudly, “and my timid gentle girls found place.”⁶⁶

So many pupils, and such crowded quarters taxed even Barton's considerable disciplinary talent. She discovered that it took “the best powers of thought and invention” to control the school. Her solution was to relate the rules of selfgovernment, which her classes in United States history were studying, to the school situation. Consulting the class in the matter, she asked their opinion—and approval—of a code of laws under which each pupil would be responsible for his or her own behavior. Although the students responded favorably to these proposals, the school board became alarmed when the news inevitably reached them. Their confidence in Barton's ability, which had risen so rapidly as the school flourished, sank, and they feared the experiment would end in defeat and mortification. Summoning the entire force of her personality and once again eschewing bombast for the art of persuasion, Barton secured a trial period for her disciplinary system. Promising that she would inform the board if the children became uncontrollable, she returned to the school and laid the case before the pupils themselves. “Now boys,” she said, “you see by this the reputation you bear among the best people of the town—how you are regarded by them…. You must either remain as you are or redeem yourselves.” As she had hoped, her students succeeded in proving the school board wrong.⁶⁷

Like their counterparts in Charlton, Oxford, and Hightstown, the Bordentown pupils became Barton's devoted admirers. George Ferguson, a member of the group that Barton had encountered on the first day, treasured the memory of this teacher who had recognized and made the boys feel important both inside and outside of the classroom. Writing to Barton more than twenty years later, he gratefully recalled that “you was never ashamed to speak to one of your scholars in school or out it mattered not how our toilets were, ragged or dirty, we always received a kind word and smile of recognition.”⁶⁸ Another observer also commented on the children's devotion: “I was often with her on little walks about town; and the girls and boys seemed to vie with each other in forestalling any wish of hers. Their affection and chivalry was received so graciously and naturally that it was a pleasure to witness.”⁶⁹

Before the end of the term the number of children clamoring to get into the school had reached such proportions that Barton wrote to her brother for advice about alleviating the situation. Stephen recommended opening a second school, a project that was endorsed by the school board. In the fall of 1852, an additional classroom, located above a tailor's shop, was outfitted. On Barton's recommendation, the board hired Frances Childs to teach the younger grades. Clara must have carried great weight with the school committee by this time, for she persuaded them to retain Childs—her old friend from North Oxford—over any of the local candidates. The two schools coexisted amicably, but even doubling the size failed to provide enough room for the children who wished to attend. When the citizens finally realized that nearly four hundred children still needed accommodation, they began talking seriously of erecting a larger building.⁷⁰

It was an unusually rewarding and happy time for Barton. The unqualified success of her school provided her with the dignity and confidence she had felt so lacking in Hightstown. Remembrances of the tangled and pained romances of the previous spring were ebbing slowly away, and she relished outings with Charlie Norton and a visit from Oliver Williams with a renewed detachment.⁷¹ If she missed the thrill of passion her letters do not show it. Fanny Childs also brought an enjoyable companionship to her life. Together they shared rooms in a boarding house run by Peter Jacques and his wife. The Jacques were amiable, Maria Jacques was an excellent cook, and the other boarders, who included Peter Suydam, were equally congenial. Indeed Fanny Childs remembered it chiefly as a time of laughter. Suydam, she noted, “frequently commented on the fact that when Clara and I were in our room together, we were always talking and laughing. It was a constant wonder to him. He could not understand how we found so much to laugh at.”⁷² By now Barton was something of a heroine in the town and, far from being socially ostracized, found herself a coveted guest. Underscoring Clara's pleasure was the great accomplishment she felt in having escaped the untenable situation in Hightstown by fearlessly moving on without friends or certain job to act as a safety net. She had come to trust her self-reliance, and this had renewed her faith in the world. Boldly she told a friend, “I have learned to think I have as good a right to live as any body and I will in spite of them.”⁷³

Throughout the winter term of 1853, Barton and Childs taught while admiration of their work grew. They were pressed to accept salaries of $250 per year and were greatly encouraged by the now almost universal support for free public education in the city.⁷⁴ With pride the Bordentown school board informed the state superintendent that “during the past year great advances have been made in…the cause of education…. We have an advance in the character of our teachers, an advance in the attendance of children, an advance in system and order within school, and an advance in the public interest felt in schools.”⁷⁵ Once convinced of the advantages of public schools, the town had no desire to keep the children not accommodated in the two schools on the streets. As a result, at a public meeting the townspeople enthusiastically approved a plan to raise four thousand dollars to build a new public schoolhouse, large enough to house all six hundred school-age children.⁷⁶

In March 1853, at the height of this triumph, Barton returned home for a visit. Ever mindful of her students, she required them to write to her as an exercise in letter writing; one pupil remembered with a certain amount of awe that she answered all with a personal note. She was not, however, completely preoccupied by her students. It had been eighteen months since she had been home, and she relished the thought of meeting the “kind friends waiting there.” Now, independent and successful, she could come home without apology to anyone. The pleasures of a triumphal visit were cut short, however, by a serious groin infection, which she recalled years later as one of the most uncomfortable illnesses of her life. Recovery was slow, but by late spring she was again in Bordentown supervising the erection of the enlarged school.⁷⁷

The handsome new school building of plastered brick was a teacher's dream, with new desks, maps, and equipment of every sort. Two stories high, it contained eight classrooms, with the distinct advantages of graded classes. The rooms gave a great deal of privacy, yet enough proximity to promote healthy competition between teachers. The town looked with pride on the rapid completion of Schoolhouse Number 1, and the opening of the school in the fall of 1853 was the “event of the season.”⁷⁸

Beneath the freshly plastered facade, however, were cracks of discontent and disappointment, especially for Barton. She was distressed to find several religious groups clamoring for state funds for their sectarian schools. Under New Jersey law, they were entitled to a share of the funds that were distributed locally, but the monies would have to come from those already earmarked for the large public school. Another minor flurry arose over the dissatisfaction of those who had previously taught the private schools. As the free schools gained in reputation, the old subscription schools gradually closed. This was the only form of livelihood open to many of the teachers. Although the school board tried to help place the teachers, some accusations worried Barton and marred her pleasure.⁷⁹

The gravest blow of all, however, was the discovery that the school was to be headed by an outsider named J. Kirby Burnham. It was Barton's sex, not her skills, to which the town objected. Having been raised in an atmosphere that encouraged her intellectual skills, having conquered rough winter schools that had shaken many a schoolmaster, and having demanded and received pay equal to a man's, she had not expected to meet such prejudice in Bordentown. It shocked her to be classed as a “female assistant” in this school, thereby ranking no higher than the other seven women who taught in the building. Not knowing what to do, she stayed on, helping with examination and classification of the six hundred pupils. But her heart was no longer in the work. She believed Burnham to be ungrateful and highhanded and resented deeply the necessity of taking orders from him. He created strict rules for governing the children, of which Barton did not approve. Burnham may indeed have possessed dictatorial qualities, or perhaps he was merely trying to establish himself in what must have been an extremely uncomfortable working relationship. In any case, Barton grew increasingly resentful of his presence, complaining vehemently that she needed “no one to give me directions and tell me what I shall and shall not do.”⁸⁰ She may also have resented the lower salary she received, for Burnham was making $600 to her $250. Her brother tried to console her: “Those that do the hardest work generally get the least pay.”⁸¹

Barton was not the only teacher who was put off by Burnham. The teachers were split in their loyalties, and the resulting disunity hampered the school's progress during the first year. Fanny Childs followed Barton's lead in deploring the unfortunate Burnham, as did another teacher, Ellen Bartine. Together these three nicknamed him “the Critter” and spent much time poking fun at his mannerisms and occupations. But another teacher, a Miss Stinton, had formed a romantic attachment to Burnham, and she rallied the other teachers to his defense.⁸² Hostility among the staff rubbed off on the children. “I don’t see why Miss Barton could not have taught in our room,” one student complained when assigned to another teacher's class.⁸³ A scathing editorial in the Bordentown Register condemned the teachers for their squabblings and unprofessional attitude. The school, it noted, had “stringent rules and regulations made to govern innocent and unoffending children, but none for those who needed them the most viz: the teachers.” The common knowledge of their quarrels was dividing the town, the paper continued, and had “completely disunited our school, destroyed its usefulness and intrinsic worth, bred war and contention in our midst, and instead of yielding the long sought blessing, is crushing us with the iron power of a despotism and covering us with the mantle of confusion and shame.”⁸⁴

Under the pressure of rivalry, unhappiness, and the bitter collapse of her hopes, Clara's health broke down. She became weak and faint, and her spirited voice first hushed to a whisper, then gave out altogether. Although she blamed it on the damp new building, lime dust, and the strain of constant speaking during the five days of pupil examinations, she would experience these symptoms again and again during her lifetime in situations in which there was no lime dust or plaster, only tension, or disappointment and overwork. She tried to remain at her post, “but it was a vain effort.” Finally, seeing that there would be no change in her status in the new school and needing desperately to escape the stressful situation, she and Fanny Childs resigned. The town protested, hoping she would stay and appear occasionally at the school to lend it her prestige and a sense of continuity, but “the strain was too great.” In February 1854 she left Bordentown, her heart broken, her future again uncertain.⁸⁵

The town, misunderstanding her motives and seeing no reason for self-blame, condemned the act. The Bordentown Register called it a “wrong” against the community and criticized Barton and Childs for “forsaking their posts without leave or warning.”⁸⁶ But they could hardly blame Clara for the school's troubles, which remained acute after she left. In May 1854, the strife culminated with Burnham's dismissal and an entire revamping of the school's structure.

Barton's family had only an inkling of the trial through which she was passing. The clues in her letters were too scanty to give a full picture of the problem, but Stephen “thought there was something in the wind” and begged her to come home, to relax from business and spend time with their aging father.⁸⁷ The family would be glad of her presence, he wrote, for they had troubles of their own. Otis Learned, the mischievous playmate of Clara's youth, was accused of robbing a safe in the company in which he worked. “I can hardly tell why,” complained Stephen, “only that his name is Larned [sic].”⁸⁸ After she finally wrote “a long history” of her “trials and perplexities,” her brothers made a special effort to encourage her. “I suppose that you have done much to establish the system of free schools in the city and in so doing have done an infinite amount of good to the rising generations,” wrote Stephen.⁸⁹ And later: “I am sorry that things have taken such a turn in the public schools, and think it must be unpleasant to you after you have done so much to help to establish them to feel that you cannot with propriety and respect to yourself continue to assist them.”⁹⁰

Despite this show of support, Clara could scarcely imagine returning home. Whereas, less than a year earlier, her plans and prospects had been on the verge of fulfillment, they now lay wasted and scattered. Her own health was, to her, a sign of her failure to meet her ambitious goals and to accept with grace the blow to her pride. To return home again at thirty-two, with no future plans, was, in her mind, to cast herself once more into subservience. Moreover, there was, in the Learned robbery, yet another family scandal to be faced. After years of smalltown gossip centering on robberies, Dolly's tragic insanity, and the storms and rages of her mother, Barton felt she could not bear another such disgrace.

Clara left Bordentown in February, but it was not until mid-March that her brother received word from her. Picking up the envelope with the familiar copperplate handwriting, he was surprised to see that the postmark read “Washington, D.C.”